No one would think of John James Audubon (1785-1851) as a miniaturist. He is known, of course, for having created, if not the largest, then certainly the most widely known printed work ever published. The Birds of America — 435 hand-coloured prints, issued in four volumes, each of which might very well weigh, depending on the binding chosen by a subscriber, 50lbs — was published between 1827 and 1838 in London by Audubon and his engraver and printer Robert Havell Jr. Around 120 copies survive today; if sets come up for sale, and they occasionally do, they’re usually priced in the vicinity of $10 million.

Havell used richly textured Whatman paper, manufactured by two different mills, ‘J. Whatman’ and ‘J. Whatman Turkey Mill’, the finest paper available, measuring roughly 39½ inches by 26½  – more than two by three feet. By comparison, Michael Hawley’s Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Last Himalayan Kingdom (2003), celebrated as the biggest book ever made, clocks in at five by seven feet — ‘nearly as big as a Ping Pong table’, according to a press release. But it only weighs around 130 pounds, less than the 200 a bound set of The Birds of America brings to the scales. Audubon wanted to portray the birds of his adopted country lifesize and so accurately that, in theory, you could pick one up and hold it against Audubon’s representation and the two would match perfectly. Hence his unique method of drawing birds – Audubon would pin a freshly killed bird to a gridded board and then transfer what he saw to a gridded sheet, thus creating a drawing that matched his original 1:1.

Audubon’s obsession with size had its roots in a French-American controversy. In his multi-volume Histoire naturelle, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-88), argued that the climatic conditions in the New World had stunted the size of American animals, a claim that raised the hackles of Thomas Jefferson, who in 1786 had the skin of a moose shipped from Vermont to Paris so that the French naturalist could see for himself that the American species was in fact bigger than the European elk. Yet Audubon’s size fetish was also a form of compensatory boasting. Recent debates have drawn attention to Audubon’s personal shortcomings, notably his racial biases and the fact that, during the time he ran a store in Kentucky, he owned enslaved men and women. Audubon himself was the son of a slaveholder and occasional slave trader, and, born in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), he wasn’t even, depending on one’s point of view, reliably French. Audubon’s desire to be known and remembered for having achieved something monumental – as the producer of the biggest, best, most beautiful work on American birds – could easily be seen as an outsider’s quest for dominance in a field where others felt he didn’t really belong (as one of his most vocal critics, George Ord of the Natural Academy of Sciences, wasted no time in pointing out).

There was yet another reason, a more noble, artistic one: Audubon didn’t want to be perceived as scientific illustrator. His art, as demonstrated by references in his journals and ornithological essays, had its roots both in the history of European painting (although his assertion that he studied with Jacques-Louis David was false, he systematically visited museums and felt comfortable invoking Van Dyck or Titian in his writing: ‘I have always imagined’, he wrote in his essay on what has now become the most elusive American bird, ‘that in the plumage of the beautiful Ivory-billed Woodpecker, there is something very closely allied to the style of colouring of the great VANDYKE.’ Audubon wanted to capture that mix of immediacy and sophistication in his work, too. He wanted to create or recreate a relationship with the birds he painted that was so intimate that viewers could imagine themselves alternately looking at a portrait in some fancy art gallery or out in the American wilderness next to him. Audubon’s miniatures viewed up close have some surprising things to say about the relationship between humans and nature — and they also remind us that artists might have something to say to us even if their personal views strike us as repellent.

Audubon’s artistic goals, as well as his bravado, are immediately evident to anyone who sees his plates in their original format, not reduced to the size of a wall calendar, postcard, or internet thumbnail. Just look at some of the best-known plates from The Birds of America — the bald eagle high up on some rocky precipice, perched on the body of a dead catfish (plate 126); his soaring golden eagle, a bleeding rabbit dangling from her talons (plate 181); the whooping crane, bent over so that Audubon can fit that body into his drawing (plate 226; ill. 1); the gangly-legged American flamingo, shown with its neck down, because if the bird decided to rise to its full height, the head would poke far beyond the frame of the picture (plate 431).

The etchings in The Birds of America are big, and they know they are big. In the plate of the whooping crane, you see a tiny bit of wing sticking out on the right, a humorous reminder that even this large format cannot accommodate such an enormous animal. Audubon used a fancy technical term for this format, ‘Double Elephant Folio’, conjuring, conveniently, the presence of the largest-known land animal.

Unsurprisingly, The Birds of America took 11 years to complete, and it broke the bank. Audubon was undaunted; his next step was to create a smaller version, the Royal Octavo edition (1840-44), as he called it, which was lithographed in the US, and improved his financial situation — so much so that he was able to undertake another giant project, three volumes of The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (1845-48), lithographed on ‘Imperial Folio’ sheets, 22 by 28 inches. He had learned his lesson. The smaller format still allowed him to represent at least some of the animals in their ‘natural size’, as he proudly noted. Audubon couldn’t finish his Quadrupeds himself – dementia claimed him when he had drawn a little more than half of the 150 plates. His sons Victor and John Woodhouse, viewed by most as less lavishly gifted, completed the illustrations (John did the animals, Victor the backgrounds); his longtime collaborator, the Charleston naturalist and clergyman John Bachman, revised and finished the text. Audubon’s quadrupeds are not as flashy, nor as immediately appealing as his birds. Their eyes radiate fierceness, while their fangs and extended claws warn us not to come too close. But, as Edmund Wilson pointed out in Patriotic Gore (1962), they might show us more of the realities of frontier America — the America of the poor whites and dispossessed Native Americans — than his birds do.

The largeness of Audubon’s monumental plates frequently depends on the presence of something smaller. The whopping crane doubles in size when compared to the little alligators Audubon added. In his work, the small energizes the large. Smallness enters and organises his plates in various ways — most predictably in the shape of the chicks swarming around their parents, as in his portrait of a female American turkey or the willow ptarmigan (The Birds of America, plate 6, ill. 191). Their inclusion serves the purpose of scientific information and of scale. The very young northern bobwhite peeking out from the panicky jumble of bodies under attack by a red-tailed hawk, is almost comically uncomprehending, anthropomorphic in its confusedness (plate 76, ill. 2).

In other instalments, there is more going on: small things determine the kinetic energy of a plate, as in the engraving of a pair of upland sandpipers, in which the top bird reaches for a mosquito, while the lower one is about to gobble up a snail (plate 303). While Audubon’s butterflies and moths, with their colourful wings, seem like variations, from a different branch of the animal kingdom, of birdness, the barely discernible flies in other plates look as if they hail from a different world. For an excellent example, see the ‘Whip-poor-will’ (plate 82), where the extended wings of the top butterfly replicate the shape of the descending male bird, while the second butterfly, suspended in mid-air, echoes the horizontal position of the female perched on the branch of the oak tree. In plate 225, Audubon’s eastern kingbird is getting ready to gobble up a bee, drawn with surprising care and precision, its yellow fuzz matching the yellow tuft on the bird’s crown. More familiarly, the beetle about to be devoured by Audubon’s ivorybills (likely a bess bug or patent leather beetle, Odontotaenius disjunctus) draws the three birds together in a kind of compositional triangle, a riff on the other triangular shapes in the picture, formed by the birds’ bodies, beaks, and heads (plate 66, ill. 3).

Perhaps my favourites in this category are Audubon’s northern shovelers, united in their greed, fighting for a small insect (a caterpillar in this painting) still tantalisingly out of reach, an almost balletic arrangement that allows Audubon to twist and turn his birds, giving us something like a 3D-image of their bodies. Normally just discernible to the birds, these small things are now rendered visible to us, the human viewers, because we learn to see with the birds, learn to see like the birds (plate 327, ill. 4).

None of these examples are true miniatures, if by miniature we mean ‘a reduced version of something that was originally bigger’ and was ‘consciously created as such’ (I am using Simon Garfield’s simple, useful definition). So, here’s an important correction of my initial statement: Audubon usually doesn’t  monumentalise or minimise things. The impressive largeness of his birds, as well as the smallness of his moths, flies, bees, and caterpillars, is nature’s largeness and nature’s smallness. There are, however, true miniatures in Audubon’s work — flocks of smaller birds in the background of plates that feature lifesize representatives of the species proudly posing in the foreground. Take the flamingo, a spectacular bird that would have reminded Audubon of his Caribbean origins. His original watercolour, which served as the basis for the plate, had no background, but the finished image shows a whole flock of little flamingos receding into the background, miniatures, if you will — added by Audubon’s engraver Havell, who would have done nothing without Audubon’s approval. A similar arrangement, executed perhaps more crudely, is Audubon’s depiction of a sandhill crane, in which other cranes, faint duplicates of the giant bird in the centre of the plate, populate the hilly landscape in the middle distance. The obvious reason for such additions is to remind us that many birds live in flocks (plate 261, ill. 5).

These miniaturised background birds are multiplications of what we see in the foreground, executed with less care than the individuals represented in the plate, ghostly copies of the real stars of the picture, often drawn not by Audubon himself. Such configurations occur less frequently in his work on the Quadrupeds, where he focuses on smaller animals, which tend to live in families rather than herds.

The most interesting miniatures, however, appear in those plates in which Audubon gives us indications of the presence of humans, including tokens of our existence, such as an old hat, fences, log cabins, a farmhouse, and occasionally entire cities. Those miniatures may carry references of pioneer life in the background – as in the plate featuring a Swainson’s hawk swooping down on a terrified hare, where the violence done to the wilderness by humans cutting down the trees matches that of nature itself (plate 362). They may suggest a more peaceful domestic life, as represented by the smoking chimney in Audubon’s portrait of the common snipe (plate 243). Or they may include views of towns and cities, such as of Key West in the plate of the great blue heron or of Baltimore in the plate picturing a group of canvasbacks (plate 301, ill. 6).

In the latter, Audubon plays very effectively with the contrast between the foreground (the world of the birds going about their business) and the background (the port city of Baltimore).

Arranging the birds in such a way that they seem to frame the panorama of a distant city, Audubon cleverly ironises our anthropocentric way of looking: he makes us see Baltimore from a duck’s point of view. His plate thus undermines the accompanying essay in Audubon’s Ornithological Biography, written, as a fair share of his prose was, to please his subscribers. There he talks about these birds in an unabashedly anthropocentric way, praising their culinary value and mentioning the price they fetch on the market.

The landscapes created for The Viviparous Quadrupeds repeat this move from hardscrabble frontier life to ordered civilisation, from the tipis visible in his portrait of Franklin’s ground squirrels, even then a species of concern (‘None of the species are found in the settled portions of our country’, wrote Audubon and Bachman 180 years ago), to the deforested landscape intersected by fences and farms in the red fox lithograph, where civilisation reaches into the foreground of the plate, in the form of the trap clamped around the animal’s right hind leg (The Viviparous Quadrupeds, plates 84, 87).

For Susan Stewart, the miniature unlocks ‘the world of things’, revealing their secrets, giving us the key to stories that lie ‘outside the given field of perception’. This is true also of Audubon’s miniatures, but there’s an important difference. The ‘given field of perception’ in Audubon’s portraits of birds or quadrupeds is already an unusual one, not the one we draw on in our daily lives. In Audubon’s work, we see landscapes inhabited primarily by birds and only secondarily (if at all) by humans, a topography in which the human presence or the accoutrements of human civilisation appear marginalised, miniaturised, made into toys, even if the latter are, as Audubon’s fox had occasion to find out, lethal ones.

One might say that this is due to the genre – who would want to see humans in a natural history illustration? But then Audubon clearly wanted more than to illustrate nature. He wanted to make it come alive again in his art, aiming for painterly effect whenever it seemed suitable. ‘There are no miniatures in nature’, writes Stewart. Making things smaller, reducing them in size is what humans do, the result of a human eye rearranging, manipulating what it perceives. Audubon’s miniatures are not meant to shed fresh light on a world we know so well. Instead, he hoped to defamiliarise our experience of that world, to make it strange, to invite us to contemplate landscapes in which we aren’t the primary residents, where we are background, not foreground. His miniatures suggest to us that the natural world is the scale by which we should measure the human world, not the other way around. When we learn to see how a bird or a squirrel sees, it is our world, not theirs, that suddenly seems different. Thus, Audubon’s miniatures don’t ultimately fit Stewart’s definition with its emphasis on longing and nostalgia; instead, they work to – in the words of miniaturist Louise Krasniewicz, Stewart’s most vocal critic – ‘engage, confront, [and] question’.

This defamiliarising impulse becomes even more pronounced when Audubon decides to include actual human figures. Take the shrew mole in The Viviparous Quadrupeds (plate 66, ill. 7), a common enough animal, a familiar sight ‘to every farmer or gardener throughout the Northern and Eastern States’. And yet there’s so little that is really known about it. Audubon tried to keep one of these animals captive for a while but, overwhelmed by its voraciousness, gave up: ‘forty or fifty worms of moderate size did not appear too much’. In the lithograph, we see a tiny farmer ploughing a field, a diminished figure in a world where moles and their appetites – and the mysteries surrounding them – suddenly matter. While Audubon casts his birds and mammals as citizens of a world that belongs to them, he represents humans – and the human presence in that world – as marginal to it, dwarfed by their commanding presence.

Consider, too, the snowy egret from The Birds of America, placed in a lush South Carolina marsh landscape, complete with reeds in the foreground, a river and lake in the centre, and a well-kept plantation beckoning on the horizon (plate 242, ill. 8).

Egrets aren’t thrilled by human intruders, wrote Audubon, especially when they are breeding: ‘They rise silently on the wing, alight on the trees near, and remain there until you depart.’ Audubon’s assistant George Lehman inserted the small figure of a hunter into the scene. Wielding a matchstick-sized gun, he provides an ironic counterpoint to the glorious, white-feathered beauty of the egret facing the viewer. Was that hunter intended to represent Audubon?

In the original watercolour for the plate of the golden eagle, Audubon had also included a human figure, virtually eclipsed by the massive soaring bird that dominates the composition. Precariously balanced on an uprooted tree, a small eagle (the mate?) strapped to his back, the little hunter is shown moving across a deep rocky abyss, away from the nest he has just emptied. When it comes to sheer destructiveness, humans have the last laugh. But this painting tells a different story: next to the magnificent, godlike bird, impressive even in her failure, the human hunter – Audubon’s self-portrait – seems puny, pathetic, self-involved. As Roberta Olson has shown, the metal tube attached to the hunter – used for carrying paper – bears the initial ‘A’ for Audubon. Likely, the contrast was too blatant to make it into the finished plate; Havell did not engrave the hunter, leaving, poignantly, only the empty trunk, with no one on it (plate 181, ill. 9).

The hunter figure reappears in one of the last plates in The Viviparous Quadrupeds attributed to Audubon, and it’s a truly strange one. The awkwardness of execution has made scholars think it was in fact done by John Woodhouse. An emaciated mule deer doe, with a small bleeding wound on its side, a small tear dropping from its eye, is seen staggering away from a miniaturised hunter to the left, hurt by a badly aimed bullet (plate 78, ill. 10).

Blood is welling up inside its body, staining the deer’s lips. Some of it has dripped on the ground. In the distance, a group of tiny men, visible only with a magnifying glass, can be seen warming themselves around a campfire. Did Victor Audubon paint them as well as the lonely hunter on the left, as part of his work on the background? If we ignore the hat, the little man, knee-deep in prairie grass, does resemble the elderly Audubon as he was photographed in 1850 by Mathew Brady – the aquiline nose, the angular, avian face, the sunken cheeks (we know that Audubon had no teeth left at that time), the fluffy white hair are the same. He has already fired his shot. His rifle isn’t aimed at anything, and he is curiously dissociated from the mess he has made, pushed aside by the spectacle of the dying animal in the foreground.

Reduction in size does not mean reduction in significance. Audubon’s miniatures provide a rich counter-narrative to his lifesize birds and quadrupeds, but it’s not an enriching, uplifting one. As Audubon noticed during his decades in the field, humans, with their logging, farming, trapping, and shooting, diminish the natural environment wherever they go. Thus, it seems appropriate that in his work he would portray them — and himself — as diminished, too, in comparison with the animals they decimate. Such strategies of diminishment, I would argue, retrospectively enlarge our view of Audubon, giving us reason to return to his work again and again, giving us hope, too, that truly great artists cannot be reduced to their personal shortcomings. Just consider what happens when Audubon, that self-described ‘two-legged monster, armed with a gun’ (from his essay about the ‘American Woodcock’), a man who killed birds by the basketful, makes miniatures of human beings and their world even as he draws his animals the size of life, cleverly reminding us that one of the puniest things in nature is — us.